Cordell Hull

Cordell Hull (2 October 1871-23 July 1955) was the US Secretary of State from 4 March 1933 to 30 November 1944, succeeding Henry L. Stimson and preceding Edward Stettinius, Jr..

Biography
Cordell Hull was born on 2 October 1871 in Olympus, Tennessee, and he was elected the Chairman of the US Democratic Party in Clay County in 1890 at the young age of nineteen. The next year, he graduated from the Cumberland School of Law and was admitted to the bar, serving in the state house of representatives from 1893 to 1897. During the Spanish-American War, he served as a captain in the Tennessee volunteer infantry in Cuba. From 1907 to 1921 and from 1923 to 1931, he served in the US House of Representatives from Tennessee's 4th congressional district, and from 1931 to 1933 he served as the Senator from Tennessee in the US Senate.

In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed him as the delegate to the London Economic Conference as Secretary of State, a post which he would hold for over eleven years. Hull began the "Good Neighbor Policy" with Latin America, preventing any countries there from joining the Axis Powers, and he also negotiated with Nazi Germany and Japan before the war. Hull was friendly with Vichy France during the war, protesting at Charles de Gaulle's occupation of the islands of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon (off the coast of Canada) and demanding the reinstatement of the Vichy governor; he reasoned that his friendly relations with Vichy France led to general Henri Giraud's defection to the Allies with the French armies in North Africa.

Following the war's end in 1945, Hull was one of the founders of the United Nations, an international body which he believed could prevent more devastating wars from breaking out. He was granted the Nobel Peace Prize after the war's end for his role as the "Father of the United Nations", but his struggle from sarcoidosis (lung disease) led to his death in 1955.